Game Management Unit 28 comprising the area of Salmon, ID was used for the fine‐scale
analysis. 126 wolf data points were collected the summer of 2007 within GMU 28. The 44
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presence points were determined from wolf scat, hair, track, howls, and/or sightings. The 82
absence points were areas visited and after a thorough search no sign was found.
ArcMap 9.2 and accompanying tools were for the analysis. The GAP Idaho land cover map
(Scott et al. 2002) was masked by GMU 28 (map from Bureau of Land Management, Idaho
Office). The mid‐scale Land Cover map has a cell size of 30 meters and has integer values
ranging from 1000 to 9000 indicating different categories of land cover. The spatial analyst tool
‘reclass’ was used to combine the land cover values into common categories based on their
thousands‐place value (table 1). The data points were overlaid on the raster land cover and
each point was buffered using the vector analysis tool ‘buffer.’ The buffer was a circle with a
radius of 2.5 km (figure 2). The size of the buffer was decided based on literature indicating the daily movement distance of gray wolves in Italy and Poland between 17 – 38 km/day (Ciucci et
al. 1997; Jedrzejewki et al. 2001). The buffer size chosen was on the small end because the
studies were based on radio‐telemetry and the movement calculated was net movement, not
necessarily movement in a straight‐line distance.